In 2025, Kash Patel was appointed the director of the FBI. From 2017-2019, he was the assistant coach of the Tigers’ club hockey team.
Patel has been one of the most controversial figures in the second Trump administration, starting with criticism that he wasn’t qualified for the position and continuing with questions around misuse of government resources and the FBI’s handling of the killings of US citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis.
But former Tigers players remember Patel as an intense coach during the team’s first two seasons, when the school was still known as Woodrow Wilson.
Luke Cashion, who graduated in 2021, recounted how Patel “was always that one firing us up before a game or yelling from the bench.” Grady Kraham, who graduated in 2019, remembered Patel as very enthusiastic and “very much a ‘tough love’ kind of coach.”
The team played – and still plays – in an independent hockey league with high-school students from around the DMV. Ice hockey is not a DCIAA sport and the hockey team has never been affiliated directly with Wilson or JR.
In 2017, the DC Stars had enough players from Wilson that those individuals formed a separate hockey team of only Wilson athletes. The Wilson team was funded entirely by players and continued until the 2020 season. In 2021, Wilson players were reincorporated back into the DC Stars team, and continue to play on that team today.
Patel and the other Wilson coaches were not hired by Wilson Athletics, school administrators said. “It was not sanctioned by the school,” confirmed Assistant Principal Marc Minsker, who oversees athletics. According to former players, the coaches were unpaid volunteers. During Patel’s two seasons, the Tigers had a record of 8-10-4, ending seventh in the eight-team playoff season in 2018-19.
Kraham and Cashion did not know how Patel came to coach for Wilson. They speculated that he might have had connections with the other Wilson coaches through “beer league,” otherwise known as recreational adult hockey. Patel still plays occasionally for a team called “The Dons.”
According to Cashion, Patel’s lack of connection and relation to Wilson made the fact that he “still showed up every Friday [show] he really cared.” Kraham said Patel had childhood connections to hockey and believed that Patel’s “coaching was simply an opportunity for him to give back to the sport.”
Cashion said the team had “no idea that Kash was so intertwined with Trump while he was coaching us.” Cashion found out that Patel had been Trump’s pick for FBI director when he saw a “DM from an old teammate being like ‘that’s Coach Kash.’”
Patel stepped down as assistant coach of the hockey team after the 2018-19 season. Players said the team was told that Patel had to step down because he had received an important job, but they were unaware of what the job was. In February 2019, Patel was named a deputy assistant to the president on the National Security Council. Kraham said that learning the news was “one of those ‘small world’ moments.”
Kraham said that finding out that Patel had been appointed FBI director “was just another reminder of how interconnected things feel in Washington.” Kraham added, “The other coaches were probably aware of what [Patel] did for a living, but the players were young and didn’t really pay attention to that kind of thing.”
After the US men’s hockey team won gold at the Olympics last month, Patel was recorded in the US locker room wearing a player’s gold medal while chugging beer and banging on a table and yelling and celebrating with the team. After the video went viral, Patel posted on X that he was “extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted Gold medal winners of Team USA, invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment.”
The video of Patel’s celebration came at a time when the FBI was monitoring American presence in Mexico following the outbreak of violence caused by the Mexican government’s assassination of a major drug cartel leader. In addition, a video call by Patel to President Trump in the locker room led to controversy over an offensive joke made by Trump about the women’s team.
Cashion said that he never would have thought at the end of his last Wilson hockey game that “someone in the room would eventually be wearing the USA hockey gold medal.” •
